Material handling vehicles are commonly found in warehouses, factories, shipping yards, and, generally, wherever pallets, large packages, or loads of goods are required to be transported from place to place. Material handling vehicles typically include load-bearing forks for lifting packages or pallets for transporting, a drive motor for propelling the truck, a steering control mechanism, an operator compartment, and a brake. A user or operator of the material handling vehicle may stand or sit within the operator compartment during use.
When a material handling vehicle is in use, the operator controls the functionality of the vehicle via the manipulation of an array of controls, levers, wheels, and switches for driving the vehicle forward and backward, steering the vehicle, and raising and lowering the forks, among other things. One or more of these controls typically involves the use of one or more control handles, which may include an arm that is pivotable about a pivot point. Information related to the position of the one or more control handles is sent to a truck control system, or a controller or processor, which processes this information during operation of the material handling vehicle.
Current control handles provide information in a binary fashion. In this sense, typical control handles use a cam on a tiller to indicate that the handle is in the operating region or that the handle is not in the operating region. This binary signal does not indicate the absolute and/or continuous angle of the handle position. As such, the truck control system of the material handling vehicle does not receive information regarding the absolute and continuous position of the control handle, and the angular rate of change of the handle.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide systems and methods for sensing the position of one or more control handles provided on a material handling vehicle to provide information related to the angular position and angular rate of change of the one or more control handles.